Presidential Election: FG finally  breaks silence, says 12.9m cyber attacks recorded

No fewer than 12.9 million cyber attacks have been recorded from within and outside the country during the just-concluded Presidential and National Assembly polls, the Nigerian government revealed.

The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Pantami, who disclosed this on Tuesday, said over 6.9 million attacks were recorded on election day alone.

Pantami added that the attacks were successfully blocked owing to the sophisticated infrastructure on the ground by different agencies of government charged with the responsibility of protecting the nation’s cyberspace.

While lauding President Muhammadu Buhari for providing the enabling environment for agencies of government to perform their assignments without let or hindrances, the Minister stated that in the build-up to the presidential elections, threat intelligence revealed an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigeria’s cyberspace.

A total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded, originating from both within and outside Nigeria. It is worth noting that the Centers successfully blocked these attacks and/or escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action,” Pantami said, according to a statement by his media aide, Uwa Suleiman.

“During this period, a series of hacking attempts were recorded, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), email and IPS attacks, SSH Login Attempts, Brute force Injection attempts, Path Traversal, Detection Evasion, and Forceful Browsing.

“The parastatals, under the supervision of the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, have played a crucial role in providing the enabling environment for the successful conduct of a credible, free, fair, and transparent election.”

He also commended the cybersecurity centre established under his Ministry, including the National Information Technology (NITDA)’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERRT), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), and Galaxy Backbone (GBB)’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) for a job well done.